In translation
Notes on ‘Kamp’: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
At the centre of these books, then, is the paradox of a man trying to be objective about his own subjectivity. The paradox is inherent in any autobiographical endeavour, but there are a number of factors elevating Knausgaard’s intimate revelations above the common run of first-person narratives. The most obvious is the ambitious scale of the project.
Sensible Seeing: A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald
In its six essays on five writers and a painter, his gaze operates like a form of scansion, picking up the long and short sounds (moments musicaux as Sebald calls them, via Schubert) in order to get behind the art in all its grief and consolation, to discover the differentiation between the life and the work.
The onward surge: Dante: The Divine Comedy translated by Clive James
Here lies one of the key challenges for a modern translator. How to get the dramatis personae to communicate across the centuries? The convention is to provide some contextual information in footnotes and appendices, but James wants none of this pedantry and aims instead to incorporate essential points in the verse.